Wireless communication has become common in all aspects of life today, whether it be a wireless home or office network, so-called “hotspot” networks at local cafes, fast food chains or hotels, or even citywide implementations of WiFi technologies. This desire to become a society of wireless communication has even extended to moving devices such as a moving vehicle with the use of mobile networks. This type of wireless networking may appear in many aspects of vehicle safety applications, including, but not limited to, urgent road obstacle warning, intersection coordination, hidden driveway warning, lane-change or merging assistance. In the mobile networks, different sub-networks are used for communication and grouping vehicles and road-side units (RSUs) such as geographic based sub-networks or peer-group based sub-networks. An local peer group network is described in U.S. Pat. No. 7,848,278 issued Dec. 7, 2010 and assigned to Telcordia Technologies, Inc., et al (“Telcordia Tech”), the contents of which is incorporated herein by reference.
However, with the use of different sub-networks, vehicles and RSUs configured to communicate in one sub-network cannot communicate with vehicles and RSUs in another sub-network. This is because of the incompatibilities among the different sub-networks such as naming, addressing routing and radio technologies. For example, a geo-based source vehicle cannot send a traffic update message to a LPG-based vehicle.
U.S. application Ser. No. 13/085,967 assigned to Telcordia Technologies, Inc., et al (“Telcordia Tech”) filed on Apr. 13, 2011, describes high level architecture that supports open communication between network nodes in heterogeneous networks, the contents of which is incorporated herein by reference.